Bi-Partisan Senate report calls for sweeping effort to stop Russian trolls on social media platforms.

The more we learn about the recent hack into dozens of America’s most critical computer networks — widely attributed to Russia — the more it becomes clear that it is massive, unprecedented and crippling. Tom Bossert, who served as homeland security adviser to President Trump, writes, “It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.” (We do know they successfully penetrated the Department of Homeland Security’s systems as well as those of Treasury, Commerce and others.) Stanford’s Alex Stamos describes it as “one of the most important hacking campaigns in history.” The New York Times’ David E. Sanger, who has written several books on cyberweapons, co-wrote an article calling the breach “among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.”

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has significantly expanded its hybrid warfare, using new methods to spread chaos among its adversaries. The United States will have to fortify its digital infrastructure and respond more robustly to the Kremlin’s mounting cyberattacks. But what about the perhaps more insidious Russian efforts at disinformation, which have helped to reshape the information environment worldwide?

In 2016, two scholars at Rand Corp. wrote a paper describing Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. Very different from Cold War-era propaganda, current Russian approaches work with prevailing technologies and social media platforms. There are two key features — “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.” There is no effort at consistency or credibility. The report quotes one analyst: “New Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

Russia’s method closely resembles Trump’s own propaganda strategy. Trump issues a blizzard of messages, using every medium he can find. He is usually untruthful but always entertaining. He never worries about consistency, asking only that you remember his most recent claims. When campaigning in 2016 he argued that the unemployment rate was a hoax, that the Federal Reserve was keeping interest rates dangerously low and that the stock market was a bubble about to burst. Once he entered the White House, he soon said the opposite about all three. If you bombard people in the present, few have time to dwell on the past.

Wittingly or unwittingly, Trump uses the Russian model, which rests on the principle that people get convinced when they hear the same message many times from a variety of sources, no matter how biased. He adds to this an intuitive understanding of how social media works. If you make a claim that is truly outrageous, it will attract attention and eyeballs, spread far and wide, and ensure that people hear it repeatedly — and over time begin to believe it. A boring truth dies on Twitter, while a sensational lie goes viral and (most disturbingly) over time become a half-truth. (I recently experienced this myself. A commentary of mine was edited so that I seemed to be saying close to the opposite of what I actually was, which then ensured that it was widely disseminated.)

Trump has set a new standard because he simply does not view the truth as a constraint. A principled conservative would explain that Republicans do not have a replacement for Obamacare because they don’t believe the federal government should be required to guarantee health care as a right. Trump’s method is easier — he simply asserts that he has a plan, even better than Obamacare. Trump has announced he will veto the defense appropriations bill, apparently because it removes Confederate names from bases and does not repeal Section 230, a rule about social media companies. But he decided it would be simpler to claim that “THE BIGGEST WINNER OF OUR NEW DEFENSE BILL IS CHINA.” There is no conceivable sense in which this is factual — the bill actually would create a formal deterrence initiative against Chinese expansionism. But Trump understands that a sensational lie is far more effective than a complicated truth.

The pandemic might have accelerated these trends toward disinformation. Socially isolated, cut off from most communities, Americans seem even more susceptible to theories that confirm their partisan beliefs. The most startling fact about 2020 is not that Trump tried to overturn the results of the election. Many of us predicted he would try. What is stunning is that, according to the polls, 60 million Americans believe his assertions and the series of lies that sustain them. The problem is not just that Russia has hacked America’s computer systems. It seems to have hacked our minds.

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blu3bird said:

It's not always Russians attacking us, we have enemies within. I'm sure you've seen this, but they just arrested this guy and he's an American. Take a guess what platform/weapon he used to attack us with. Twitter and FB needs to be taken down and banned, the same way some guns are banned. There is absolutely no reason for people to use those social media sites. They are tools/weapons that are used to inflict damage

He used Twitter to mislead voters. Now he's being charged with election interference.

The charges are potentially a tectonic shift in how the federal government tries to enforce laws against election interference.

www.yahoo.com

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• Russia targeted US elections in 2020
  
  BREAKING NEWS
  An intelligence report identifies Russian efforts aimed at 'denigrating' Biden and helping Trump
  READ: ODNI's declassified Intelligence Community assessment of foreign threats to the 2020 US federal elections
• Can we stop Russia from interfering in our elections?

hanimmal said:

Who is Daily Kos, and why should we care if what you say is true or not about them?

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Russia Recalls Ambassador For Talks After Biden Says Putin Will Pay For Election Meddling (Update)

The Russian government has recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations in Moscow after President Joe Biden said Vladimir Putin would “pay a price” for meddling in the 2020 election. The announcement...

www.dailykos.com

Choco8 said:

Daily Kos is a site dedicated to sheep-herding liberals into supporting establishment Democrats, which unfortunately includes infusing them with a great deal of propaganda and fear-mongering about Russia, which I think is a dangerous development, You can read the post I screenshotted here:

Russia Recalls Ambassador For Talks After Biden Says Putin Will Pay For Election Meddling (Update)

The Russian government has recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations in Moscow after President Joe Biden said Vladimir Putin would “pay a price” for meddling in the 2020 election. The announcement...

www.dailykos.com

Why should you care? I would say you should care if you think the idea of expelling thousands of Russian citizens from the USA is disgusting.

But maybe you think it's a good idea. Maybe you think Russian citizens are actually dangerous. I really don't know.

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Choco8 said:

Daily Kos is a site dedicated to sheep-herding liberals into supporting establishment Democrats, which unfortunately includes infusing them with a great deal of propaganda and fear-mongering about Russia, which I think is a dangerous development, You can read the post I screenshotted here:

Russia Recalls Ambassador For Talks After Biden Says Putin Will Pay For Election Meddling (Update)

The Russian government has recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations in Moscow after President Joe Biden said Vladimir Putin would “pay a price” for meddling in the 2020 election. The announcement...

www.dailykos.com

Why should you care? I would say you should care if you think the idea of expelling thousands of Russian citizens from the USA is disgusting.

But maybe you think it's a good idea. Maybe you think Russian citizens are actually dangerous. I really don't know.

Click to expand...

The Biden administration on Thursday imposed the first significant sanctions targeting the Russian economy in several years in order to punish the Kremlin for a cyberespionage campaign against the United States and efforts to influence the presidential election, according to senior U.S. officials.

The administration also sanctioned six Russian companiesthat support Russian spy services’ cyberhacking operations and will expel 10 intelligence officers working under diplomatic cover in the United States.
The measures are an effort to make good on President Biden’s vow to hold Moscow accountable for a series of operations, including the hacking operation commonly known as SolarWinds, which compromised nine federal agencies and about 100 private firms.

“Our view is that no single action that we will take or could take in and of itself could directly alter Russia’s malign behavior,” principal deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer said. “But this is going to be a process that is going to take place over time, and it will involve a mix of significant pressure and finding ways to work together.”

The announcement of a U.S. response had been repeatedly pushed back, in part because Biden has wanted his team to develop more effective measures, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a call on Tuesday that Washington would be taking actions “in the coming days” to defend U.S. national interests, without specifying the exact timing or measures, a senior administration official said. Biden also raised the possibility of a summit with Putin.

As president-elect, Biden had told Putin in January that his administration would be “compelled to respond” to these activities, the official said. “So it should not come as a surprise to the government of Russia that we’re taking these actions.”

Biden administration planning to sanction Russia for SolarWinds hacks

The package includes sanctions on all debt Russia issues after June 14, barring U.S. financial institutions from buying government bonds directly from the Russian Central Bank, Russian National Wealth Fund and the Ministry of Finance. The action, experts said, will complicate Moscow’s ability to raise money in the international capital markets.

Under a new order signed by Biden, the administration is reserving the right to broaden the scope of the sovereign debt sanctions if Moscow’s malign activities persist, officials said.

“This action signals that the Biden administration is not going to hold back,” said Edward Fishman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “They’re taking significant actions against the Russian economy and putting global markets on notice that Russian sanctions will increase if Russia’s aggressive behavior continues.”

Many commentators have observed that sanctions to date have not materially affected the Kremlin’s risk calculus, and they say that more sanctions are unlikely to do so.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Russia viewed any U.S. sanctions as illegal and would retaliate in kind.

Peskov said sanctions would not be helpful in the lead-up to a proposed summit between Biden and Putin.

“We condemn any sanction aspirations. We believe they are illegal. In any case, the principle of reciprocity applies in this case. Reciprocity will meet our interests in the best possible way,” Peskov said.

European allies and NATO are expected to issue statements of support following the White House’s announcement, though they are not planning to impose fresh sanctions of their own, officials said.

The measures will be accompanied by what the White House hopes will be a strong message to Moscow to convey U.S. displeasure, but without cutting off diplomacy, said a second official. The message, the official said, is: “We are willing to talk about certain things, but we can’t have a strong relationship while you continue to take these malign steps.”

One action that will not be tied to the sanctions is Russia’s reported effort to put bounties on the heads of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2019, officials said. U.S. intelligence agencies had low to moderate confidence that officers with the Russian military spy agency, the GRU, sought to encourage Taliban attacks against U.S. and coalition personnel — not strong enough to justify the imposition of sanctions, officials said.

“But we do believe that this information puts the burden on the Russian government to explain its action and takes steps to address this disturbing pattern of behavior,” the senior administration official said. “We expressed those concerns directly to the government of Russia.”

The new executive order focuses on Russian activities outside its borders and “is intended to signal to the Russian government that its destabilizing behavior is unacceptable and that the United States will impose economically impactful costs if it continues or escalates,” the senior official said.

On Ukraine’s doorstep, Russia boosts military and sends message of regional clout to Biden

The executive order is sweeping, covering a range of actions that can be sanctioned, from cyberattacks to election interference to transnational corruption. Creating such an umbrella order streamlines the messaging, allowing the administration to sanction one state — Russia — for a diverse set of activities under one authority, experts said.

“It’s good to clearly message our priorities to Russia,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “By packaging a response to several things at once, the administration can get off the back foot and move on its agenda. What we don’t want is to always be in response mode to Russia.”

The sanctions and expulsions come four months after revelations that Russian cyberspies had compromised major federal agencies, including the Treasury and State departments and a number of private-sector companies. The hacks were enabled by corrupted software updates from the Texas-based company SolarWinds. The Washington Post first reported that the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR was believed to be behind the intrusions. The SolarWinds link was first disclosed by a private cyber firm, FireEye.

The White House officially named the SVR, also known by the moniker Cozy Bear, as the perpetrator behind the spy campaign. The intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment, officials said.

Biden’s repeated vows to punish the party responsible raised expectations the administration would take action — despite the fact that the intrusions apparently fell into the category of political espionage. All countries engage in such espionage.

But senior administration officials have said that Russia’s presence in federal networks could give it a toehold to undertake more disruptive actions. And some policy experts have said that should be grounds for punishment. Others disagreed, saying the operation did not reach disruptive levels.

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BOSTON (AP) — A global epidemic of digital extortion known as ransomware is crippling local governments, hospitals, school districts and businesses by scrambling their data files until they pay up. Law enforcement has been largely powerless to stop it.

One big reason: Ransomware rackets are dominated by Russian-speaking cybercriminals who are shielded — and sometimes employed — by Russian intelligence agencies, according to security researchers, U.S. law enforcement, and now the Biden administration.

On Thursday, as the U.S. slapped sanctions on Russia for malign activities including state-backed hacking, the Treasury Department said Russian intelligence has enabled ransomware attacks by cultivating and co-opting criminal hackers and giving them safe harbor. With ransomware damages now well into the tens of billions of dollars, former British intelligence cyber chief Marcus Willett recently deemed the scourge“arguably more strategically damaging than state cyber-spying.”

The value of Kremlin protection isn’t lost on the cybercriminals themselves. Earlier this year, a Russian-language dark-web forum lit up with criticism of a ransomware purveyor known only as “Bugatti,” whose gang had been caught in a rare U.S.-Europol sting. The assembled posters accused him of inviting the crackdown with technical sloppiness and by recruiting non-Russian affiliates who might be snitches or undercover cops.

Worst of all, in the view of one long-active forum member, Bugatti had allowed Western authorities to seize ransomware servers that could have been sheltered in Russia instead. “Mother Russia will help,” that individual wrote. “Love your country and nothing will happen to you.” The conversation was captured by the security firm Advanced Intelligence, which shared it with the Associated Press.

“Like almost any major industry in Russia, (cybercriminals) work kind of with the tacit consent and sometimes explicit consent of the security services,” said Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst who runs the consultancy Active Measures LLC.

Russian authorities have a simple rule, said Karen Kazaryan, CEO of the software industry-supported Internet Research Institute in Moscow: “Just don’t ever work against your country and businesses in this country. If you steal something from Americans, that’s fine.”

Unlike North Korea, there is no indication Russia’s government benefits directly from ransomware crime, although Russian President Vladimir Putin may consider the resulting havoc a strategic bonus.

In the U.S. alone last year, ransomware struck more than a hundred federal, state and municipal agencies, upward of 500 hospitals and other health care centers, some 1,680 schools, colleges and universities and hundreds of businesses, according to t he cybersecurity firm Emsisoft.

Damage in the public sector alone is measured in rerouted ambulances, postponed cancer treatments, interrupted municipal bill collection, canceled classesand rising insurance costs – all during the worst public health crisis in more than a century.



That’s what happened in a 2014 hack of Yahoo that compromised more than 500 million user accounts, allegedly including those of Russian journalists and U.S. and Russian government officials. A U.S. investigation led to the 2017 indictment of four men, including two officers of Russia’s FSB security service– a successor to the KGB. One of them, Dmitry Dokuchaev, worked in the same FSB office that cooperates with the FBI on computer crime. Another defendant, Alexsey Belan, allegedly used the hack for personal gain.

A Russian Embassy spokesman declined to address questions about his government’s alleged ties to ransomware criminals and state employees’ alleged involvement in cybercrime. “We do not comment on any indictments or rumors,” said Anton Azizov, the deputy press attache in Washington.

Proving links between the Russian state and ransomware gangs is not easy. The criminals hide behind pseudonyms and periodically change the names of their malware strains to confuse Western law enforcement.

But at least one ransomware purveyor has been linked to the Kremlin. Maksim Yakubets, 33, is best known as co-leader of a cybergang that cockily calls itself Evil Corp. The Ukraine-born Yakubets lives a flashy lifestyle, He drives a customized Lamborghini supercar with a personalized number plate that translates to ‘Thief,’ according to Britain’s National Crime Agency.

Yakubets started working for the FSB in 2017, tasked with projects including “acquiring confidential documents through cyber-enabled means and conducting cyber-enabled operations on its behalf,” according to a December 2019 U.S. indictment. At the same time, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Yakubets and offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. It said he was known to have been “in the process of obtaining a license to work with Russian classified information from the FSB.”

The indictment charged Evil Corp. with developing and distributing ransomware used to steal at least $100 million in more than 40 countries over the previous decade, including payrolls pilfered from towns in the American heartland.

By the time Yakubets was indicted, Evil Corp. had become a major ransomware player, security researchers say. By May 2020, the gang was distributing a ransomware strain that was used to attack eight Fortune 500 companies, including the GPS device maker Garmin, whose network was offline for days after an attack, according to Advanced Intelligence.

Yakubets remains at large. Another Russian currently imprisoned in France, however, might offer more insight into the dealings of cybercriminals and the Russian state. Alexander Vinnick was convicted of laundering $160 million in criminal proceeds through a cryptocurrency exchange called BTC-e. A 2017 U.S. indictment charged that “some of the largest known purveyors of ransomware” actually used it to launder $4 billion. But Vinnick can’t be extradited until he completes his 5-year French prison sentence in 2024.

Still, a 2018 study by the nonpartisan think tank Third Way found the odds of successfully prosecuting authors of cyberattacks against U.S. targets — ransomware and online bank theft are the costliest — are no better than three in a thousand. Experts say that those odds have gotten longer.

This week’s sanctions send a strong message, but aren’t likely to deter Putin unless the financial sting hits closer to home, many analysts believe.

That might require the kind of massive multinational coordination that followed the 9/11 terror attacks. For instance, allied countries could identify banking institutions known to launder ransomware proceeds and cut them off from the global financial community.

“If you’re able to follow the money and disrupt the money and take the economic incentive out, that’ll go a long way in stopping ransomware attacks,” said John Riggi, cybersecurity advisor for the American Hospital Association and a former FBI official.

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hanimmal said:

https://apnews.com/article/intelligence-agencies-epidemics-local-governments-hacking-russia-c9dab7eb3841be45dff2d93ed3102999
View attachment 4880188

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A Facebook report released Wednesday says that Russia is still the largest producer of disinformation, a notable finding just five years after Russian operatives launched a far-reaching campaign to infiltrate social media during the 2016 presidential election campaign.

Facebook says it has uncovered disinformation campaigns in more than 50 countries since 2017, when it began the cat-and-mouse game of cracking down on political actors seeking to manipulate public debate on its platform. The report, which summarizes 150 disinformation operations the company says it has disrupted in that period, highlights how such coordinated efforts have become more sophisticated and costly to run in recent years — even as these operators struggle to influence large numbers of people as they once did.

Meanwhile, more players have learned from the Russian example and have started disinformation operations in their own countries, Facebook says. That includes networks of shadowy public relations firms that sometimes do work for both sides within a country, as well as politicians, fringe political groups, and governments themselves, said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, in a media call.

“It started out as an elite sport, but now we see more and more people getting into the game,” said Gleicher, who added that such efforts increasingly resemble influence operations that were conducted before social media, “narrower, more targeted, expensive, time-consuming, and with a lower success rate.”

In 2017, Facebook discovered a vast influence operation, in which the Russian Internet Research Agency had subjected 126 million of the platform’s users to political disinformation ahead of the previous year’s election. Since then, the social network has invested resources in policing its service — including hiring more than 10,000 third-party content moderators and subject matter experts — and building algorithms to scan for unwanted content.

The big caveat to the report is that Facebook and other social media platforms see only the nefarious operations that they uncover — and do not know about the broader universe of disinformation that goes undetected.

“I think we should be careful about saying that we know what the denominator is,” Gleicher said.

Russian content on Facebook, Google and Twitter reached far more users than companies first disclosed, congressional testimony says

Some insiders have alleged that Facebook executives ignored certain areas of disinformation in some countries despite internal flags, according to reporting by The Washington Post and other media reports. They claim that political hesitancy around dinging certain politicians and parties, as well as prioritizing policing what are deemed more important elections, events, and geographies, have led to problems. Facebook has disputed those allegations.

In recent years, no other social media influence campaign that the company has detected has appeared to achieve the scale of the 2016 Russian operation. But the initial campaign also was unsophisticated in some respects. Posts often included grammatical errors that suggested non-English speakers were writing them, for example.

Since then, operators have had to devise new methods to co-opt the public.

One strategy has involved recruiting native speakers, and another involves seeking a more targeted audience to manipulate, according to the report. In early 2020, for example, Facebook disrupted a Russian military operation targeting Ukraine that created Facebook profiles of fake people purporting to be journalists. The fake journalists tried to contact and influence policymakers and influential people directly but did not appear to try to build a large Facebook audience, the report said. Russia adopted a similar strategy for a modest disinformation operation in the United States as well, although in that operation actual journalists were recruited under false pretenses to represent fabricated news outlets.

The report reveals significant trends, including how the number of foreign disinformation operations compares to domestic ones (slightly more domestic) and whether most disinformation appeared to be politically or financially motivated (the latter, but it’s not always possible to tell who is paying the shadowy PR firm).

The top countries Facebook identified as originators of most disinformation operations both domestic and foreign were Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine.

The countries that were most frequently targeted by foreign disinformation operations were the United States, Ukraine, Britain, Libya and Sudan.

As operations grow more sophisticated, it can become harder to distinguish them from authentic political activity, the report noted. That problem was particularly acute in the 2020 U.S. election, which the report described as a “a watershed moment in the recent history of influence operations.”

Facebook takes down Russian operation that recruited U.S. journalists, amid rising concerns about election misinformation

Russia, Iran and China all tried to influence public debate ahead of the vote, apparently with limited results, the report said. The most elaborate effort involved the Russian Internet Research Agency hiring people in Ghana to impersonate Black Americans discussing politics and issues of race. Facebook also discovered a shadowy network run by people in Mexico who posted about issues of Hispanic pride and the Black Lives Matter movement. The report noted that the FBI later connected this operation to the Russian IRA.

By contrast, domestic disinformation had a much greater impact that foreign. The five U.S.-based operations the company exposed heading into the 2020 election featured domestic political players who were abusing Facebook’s rules.
Four out of the five were on the political right.

One was Rally Forge, a U.S.-based marketing firm that hired a staff of teenagers to sow disinformation and was affiliated with the pro-Trump political action committee Turning Point USA, The Washington Post first reported. The others were groups affiliated with the violent conspiracy theory QAnon, a website dedicated to promoting white identity and criticizing immigration, an “inauthentic” network tied to Trump advisor Roger Stone and the Proud Boys militia group.

In addition, shortly after the election Facebook took down an “inauthentic” network tied to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. The company did not put this takedown into the report because it did not rise to the level of a full-scale disinformation operation.

One trend the report highlighted was the rise in “perception hacking,” in which the prospect of an influence operation helps cast doubt on the authenticity of public debate.

As the United States headed into the 2018 midterms, Facebook found that Russia’s IRA had created and broadcast a website, usaira.ru, complete with an “election countdown” timer where the agency claimed to have been creating nearly 100 fake Instagram accounts.

“These fake accounts were hardly the hallmark of a sophisticated operation, rather they were an attempt to create the perception of influence,” the report noted.

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A video shared by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz last week to attack the US military for being "woke" and "emasculated" originated from pro-Russian, anti-American far-right social media networks, experts on extremist propaganda have told Insider.

The video, which had been initially uploaded to TikTok, sought to unfavorably compare a US military recruitment ad to a Russian army one. The US Army clip featured an animation telling of a female corporal's life, while the Russian ad used masculine tropes, featuring fighter jets and shirtless men doing pushups.

"Holy crap," Cruz wrote in his retweet of the video. "Perhaps a woke, emasculated army is not the best idea…"



Alexander Reid Ross, a fellow at the UK's Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right who specializes in mapping the spread far-right propaganda, told Insider that he had monitored the meme as it spread from pro-Russian and far-right networks to Cruz's Twitter feed over the course of a week.

The case illustrates the route far-right propaganda can take from fringe pro-Kremlin and white supremacist networks, into mainstream Republican platforms.

From Kremlin ally to 4chan to Ted Cruz's Twitter
Here is the timeline for the spread of the video, according to Ross' analysis:

• The earliest comparison of the recruitment videos was in two May 13 tweets by Koskovics Zoltán, an analyst at the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest. The center is linked to the far-right government of Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orban, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• Zoltán's first tweet linked to a Vimeo page showing the Russian recruitment ad, and the second tweet linked to a post by the journalist Alan MacLeod slamming the "super-woke" US Army video. MacLeod is a frequent critic of western media outlets' coverage of Kremlin policy. (In an email to Insider, MacLeod said that though he was a critic of western media coverage of Russia, he was anti-Kremlin.)

• Zoltán's tweets were cited on May 14 by the Russian far-right outlet Krasnaya Vesnya and the American conservative blog Red State. Both posts mocked the comparison between the Russian and US armies.
• Gavin McInnes, founder of the far-right Proud Boys group, discussed the recruitment videos in his YouTube show on May 15.
• The two videos were then posted and discussed in threads on 4chan, the messaging board that serves as a key online hub for the right.
• On May 17, the Russian and US recruitment videos were stitched together and posted on TikTok as a single video.
• From there, the video — in its slightly altered form — was shared widely in white-supremacist forums on Telegram, the encrypted messaging app that's become a haven for extremists ousted from mainstream platforms.
• The first post featuring the TikTok on Telegram was shared by an account that posts "white nationalist and fascist content," Ross told Insider. The post had spread, Ross said, in forums popular with the US white supremacist National Justice Party, the white-nationalist Groypers group, and the Russian ultra-nationalist National Bolsheviks.
• On May 18, the TikTok was uploaded to Twitter for the first time. Insider has seen the post, which has as of Tuesday been retweeted 1,000 times.
• On May 19, Rando Quaaden, a Dutch account that has posted tweets in support of the European far-right Identitarian movement and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, tweeted the TikTok.
• On May 19, Pardes Seleh, a Texas realtor who posts conservative content on Twitter, shared the video posted by Rando Quaaden.
• And on May 20, Cruz retweeted Seleh.

Ross maintains that the version shared by Cruz made the leap onto Twitter from Telegram extremist networks. Rando Quaaden disputed this on Monday, calling it a "non-existent pipeline."

Ross said that the core message of the video was that liberalism was making the US weak, in comparison with the strength of Putin's traditionalist Russia.

"The blunt impact of the meme, for fascists, is that the US's liberal system is seen globally as a joke, and cannot stand up to other Great Powers," he said.

"The US far right picks up on pro-Kremlin propaganda, because it agrees with efforts to undermine liberalism, even when they attack nonpartisan US institutions," Ross said.

"That Republicans ally with illiberal propaganda spread by foreign adversaries should give us pause with regards to their claims to putting 'America First.'"

Cruz's response
A spokesman for Cruz told Insider that the controversy over the source of the video was distracting from the more important issue of how "wokeness" is undermining the US military.

"Sen. Cruz shared a widely-circulated video that shows wokeness is undermining the seriousness and purpose of our military. But instead of discussing this very real problem, journalists are dusting off absurd Democrat talking points and claiming the real issue here is racism, Russian propaganda, or both. They're so invested in this liberal narrative they will destroy innocent people's lives to advance it," said the spokesman.

Cruz last week claimed to be enjoying the controversy caused by the video, tweeting: "I'm enjoying lefty blue checkmarks losing their minds over this tweet, dishonestly claiming that I'm "attacking the military."

In an apparent response to Insider's request for comment, Seleh tweeted a screenshot of Insider's message, saying: "These people have been trying to destroy my life for the past week because I shared a funny TikTok video that Ted Cruz retweeted. I don't even know how to answer this. Is TikTok considered a 'white supremacist forum'??"

'US conservatives ... have frequently promoted Russian propaganda'
Critics have long warned of the dangerous melding of mainstream Republican propaganda and memes, and disinformation from extremist movements and forums.

Alex Newhouse, an expert in far-right extremism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, backed Ross' assessment that the video was distributed widely among white supremacists on Telegram before being distributed on Twitter.

"US conservatives — especially those in the midst of the pro-Trump movement, and those outside the mainstream — have frequently promoted Russian propaganda through various channels," he told Insider.

Newhouse pointed to Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn's ties to Russian state TV network RT, and a segment on the far-right US network OANN last year on election fraud that was partly written by a former associate of the Russian state-news agency Sputnik.

Republicans have opposed measures in recent years to make the US military more inclusive, with Cruz in 2016 criticizing plans to allow servicewomen to serve in combat roles.

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SAN FRANCISCO — It can feel abstract: A group of organized but faceless criminals hijacking corporate computer systems and demanding millions of dollars in exchange for their safe return. But the impact of these ransomware attacks is increasingly, unavoidably, real for everyday people.

These crimes have resulted in missed chemotherapy appointments and delayed ambulances, lost school days, and transportation problems. A ransomware attack onColonial Pipeline in May led to gas shortages and even dangerous situations caused by panic buying. This past week, hackers compromised the JBS meat processing company, leading to worries about meat shortages or other key food providers being at risk. Last fall, the Baltimore County Public Schools system was hit with ransomware and forced to halt classes for two days, which were being held virtually.

As recently as Wednesday, ransomware attacks were causing problems across the country. In Martha’s Vineyard, the ferry service transporting people to and from the Massachusetts island said it had been hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted its ticketing and reservation process. Ferries continued operating all week, but the ticketing system was still affected, causing delays, on Friday.

The recent spate of high-profile ransomware incidents is exactly what cybersecurity professionals have been warning about for years. But it’s partially the impact on everyday people — far from the executive suites, cybersecurity companies, or government agencies that regularly fret about the criminal enterprise — that has made the risk more visible. The ripple effects of ransomware can result in everything from mild inconvenience to people losing their lives, and it’s only increased in frequency during the pandemic.

Ransomware attacks could reach ‘pandemic’ proportions. What to know after the pipeline hack.

“It’s not only that it’s getting worse, but it’s the worst possible time for it to happen,” said Robert Lee, chief executive of Dragos, an industrial cybersecurity firm. He says on average, there are likely 20 to 30 big ransomware cases happening behind the scenes in addition to the ones making headlines.

Ransomware attacks are not new. The money at stake has changed drastically, however, inflating from thousands to millions of dollars, and the targets are more sophisticated as well. The increasing number of companies connecting their systems and adding more remote access points, along with things like the widespread use of bitcoin, have widened the pool of targets. Cybercriminals once focused on small companies and individuals but have made headlines this year for attacks on higher-profile victims.

“Now you’ve got ransomware affecting whole corporate networks, interrupting critical national function, causing disruption in people’s lives. It’s really become a national security, public health and safety threat,” said Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the nonprofit group Cyber Threat Alliance.

The ransomware industry has grown but the underlying techniques for gaining access have largely stayed the same.
Hackers commonly access companies’ systems through “phishing” attacks — emails sent to try to trick employees into giving up passwords or access. Once inside a company’s system, ransomware outfits will find critical information and lock it down, then contact a company to demand a ransom for it to be released.

These criminals generally work in loosely defined groups, sharing tips and resources that make it possible for individual hackers to easily extort multiple targets. Companies occasionally have backup copies of their systems that they can restore rather than pay a ransom. But that can result in delays, and sometimes hackers make copies of the information they access and threaten to leak private information online if they are not paid. A big data leak could be a huge issue for consumers, not just the companies.

“There’s this awful downward spiral of societal harm that happens from ransomware,” said Megan Stifel, co-chair of the ransomware task force and an executive director at the Global Cyber Alliance.

The Colonial Pipeline attack was one of the many worst-case scenarios experts have been warning about, and planning for, for years. A ransomware attack last month caused the company to shut down its pipeline connecting Texas to New Jersey.

Colonial hack exposed government’s light-touch oversight of pipeline cybersecurity

Panicked that they wouldn’t be able to get enough fuel, drivers swarmed gas stations, resulting in long lines and barren gas pumps in parts of the U.S. Drivers hoarded fuel as stations ran out of their supply, exacerbating the issue. The attack sparked a real-world fire in a Florida town, according to local news reports, when a Hummer burst into flames after the driver filled up four gas containers. The panic buying even prompted the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to issue a long tweet thread about gas safety, including a message that quickly went viral: “Do not fill plastic bags with gasoline.”

People’s safety has been even more directly threatened by attacks on health care systems. Hospitals have been particularly hard hit, as far back as 2016 when the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical hospital paid $17,000 in bitcoin to a ransomware hacker. Last November, the University of Vermont Medical Center was hit by ransomware and it took nearly a month for it to regain access to its medical records. Chemotherapy patients had their treatments delayed, and were sent to other health centers where some had to recreate their medical history.

Joshua Corman, the chief strategist for health care and covid on the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency COVID Task Force, has been studying the potential impact of health-care attacks on mortality rates. For example, if a hospital has to close suddenly, ambulances might take longer to reach people in distress.

“Minutes can be the difference between life and death for heart attacks, and hour or two can be the difference for a stroke,” said Corman.

Lee, the head of Dragos, recently worked with a power company that got hit with a ransomware attack but was able to maintain operations. However, attacks like that could easily result in localized power shortages, he says. Attacks on pharmaceutical companies, or any of the manufacturers in their pipeline, could delay critical medicine like insulin or even vaccines. The increased targeting of industries with the most potential for disruption may be the criminals’ business decision.

“It feels like these groups realize industrial companies are more ready to pay out and more quick to pay out, because if you impact industrial operations you have to get up and going for safety and community,” said Lee.

Beyond the physical inconveniences, ransomware attacks can also hurt public trust in technology and systems, and cause people to worry they’ll be a victim or to panic-buy products they think will see a price hike or be in short supply, according to Stifel.

The Biden administration seeks to rally allies and the private sector against the ransomware threat

Panic after attacks is part of the problem. This past week’s attack on JBS, one of the largest meat-processing companies in the world, resulted in temporary factory shutdowns. While there were not yet any confirmed meat shortages in the U.S., worried meat suppliers still warned consumers not to panic buy beef, which could cause otherwise still stable prices to go up.

From higher gas prices to canceled surgeries, real-world financial and consumer safety implications of these hacks have spurred the federal government to crack down on ransomware. It’s investigating the causes, working on guidelines, and urging corporate America to take cybersecurity protections seriously.

“We’ve been warning about this overtly for more than eight years and a lot more quietly for longer, but now that its manifested, the silver lining is that we’re not starting ice cold,” said CISA’s Corman.

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Grandpapy said:

Sounds like it's about time to declare war.

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Grandpapy said:

Sounds like it's about time to declare war.

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